‘A Birthday in a Plum Orchard’ – Leith House Saturday

We celebrate my birthday weekend with a stay at Clive of Norfolk’s in the height of the plum season. The forecast is hot and dry and just right for the beach.

Our mission is to get Millie in swimming with us but I’m not hopeful as she really doesn’t like going deeper than toenail high. In a Jack Russell’s world view if you need to cool off you just lie flat in the nearest muddy puddle.

We head out on a warm Saturday morning and it doesn’t take long to get out into a landscape of endless harvested fields. We see three kites battling high above us.

Every so often Millie sits up, looks around, checks for mountains and then relaxes back down with a sigh…

We are held up outside King’s Lynn. Two motorbikes that had overtaken us earlier have ploughed into the back of a campervan towing a car.

We finally pull into Leith House and peace of a kind descends. We are on the same pitch as last time so although we do have shade we have to suffer noisy pigeon ‘lurve’ in the trees above us.

We have a late, leisurely lunch rounded off by the sweetest plums we have eaten since the last time we were here.

Millie finds the donkeys, the hens, the plums, everything wildly exciting and we have to tie her up to stop her disappearing off down the path on her own.

We head along the dyke and through the dunes to the wide expanse of Holkham Beach. The sea is warm and we walk along its edge in bare feet. Millie is demented with joy, chewing seaweed, crunching shells and generally pushing all Darrell’s buttons.

She chases and then is chased by a pair of oystercatchers.

Jack Russell heaven…

We sit out watching the swallows and listening to the pigeons. A gentle breeze rustles the very tops of the trees.

Millie snores on my knee.

Later in the golden light of evening we walk down sandy lanes that lead between golden fields full of geese and lapwings.

We see hares everywhere, hares running, hares chasing each other, hares boxing, in fact we see more hares in thirty minutes than we’ve both seen in thirty years.

Millie hunts along the hedge margins, Jack Russell synapses firing at every chirp and rustle. She digs for moles and then comes across a tiny creature that squeaks pitifully. I suspect it is a young rat but Darrell, having studied its enormous feet thinks it’s possibly a baby wallaby.

As the sun sets skeins of geese crisscross the sky and then noisily join their comrades feeding among the stubble.